The infographic and data visualisation arm of Splashpress Media, Infographiclabs, recently teamed up with IOIX, one of the leading marketing firms in Japan to create an visualisation of the growth and success of Evernote over the last few years.

Several changes will be coming to Splashpress Media now that we have left the summer months behind and are well into Autumn.

New Community Manager – Mel Panabi

At the crossroads where old school journalism and new media stickiness collide is where you will find Mel. Using over 15 years of online experience, Mel manages communities with thousands of members who have grown to appreciate his tenacity, reliability, dynamism and wit.

Mel has been working as a blogger for several years now and has had writing stints at Splashpress Media blogs such as Forevergeek in the past. He has now rejoined us as a full time team member and will be covering a variety of blogs in the tech and entertianment channles such as Apple Gazette, 901am, Celebrific and Filmsy. He will also be account manager for our MyBlogGuest profile and responsible for all guest posts on SPM properties.

New Look Network Page

We have decided to revamp our network page and give it a new look. The network will now consist of 6 main channels:

Several sites within these channels will be redesigned and re-launched in the next 6 months so stay tuned to this blog for updates!

ManangeWP Partnership

During September we have been moving forwards with our partnership with ManageWP. This allows one to manage multiple wordpress sites from a central location. This is a must have for all publishers operating multiple blogs as it has time saving functions such as upgrading plugins and themes with a single click. The entire umbrella of Splashpress Media covers well over 700 blogs so this will a crucial time saver for us!

Forums Coming To Forevergeek.com

We are currently working on a brand new forum for our tech/geek site Forevergeek. This will be a board to bring together our readers in one place where they can share their geeky finds on the web, argue over who would win in a fight between Spiderman and Batman and moan about George Lucas’ latest edits to the Star Wars saga.

The forum will be launched in early October with a competition and some great prizes for the readers that create the best new threads, stay tuned to the site!

Blog Search Engine Redesign

Blog Search Engine has been running with a paid membership model for around 18 months now and we are going to be revamping its design and also announcing some new packages for bloggers to get even more exposure for their blogs. Expect to see this launched around the first week of October.

Splashpress Media now has been sporting the same designs across our network for several years already, some of these designs more than 4 years old already.

After the compulsory redesign of our new webdesign studio BusinessLogs, the second half of 2010 kicked off a major design overhaul, under the supervision of the talented Ia Sofimi at Businesslogs. Amid work on several joint ventures, we immediately started with some of the most popular sites in our rolodex and tackled the popular ForeverGeek and Freelance Writing Jobs.

ForeverGeek

ForeverGeek’s former design by Design Disease was a very popular design and widely recognized. When we started we wanted to maintain as many elements as possible, preserving the brand’s identity.

Next up on our roster was a realignment of ForeverGeek. A realignment, you say? If you’re familiar with the old design, this new iteration still carries a similar look and layout, but with a few new touches.

There are now four main sections on the homepage: Features, Games, Anime & Comics, and the Rest—color-coded so they’re easy to distinguish. At the top, the latest post is featured in each box. In the content area, each section dynamically cycles through each post.

Freelance Writing Jobs

Next on the list was the number one community for Freelance writers, Freelance Writing Jobs, which we acquired mid-2010. Also at FWJ a lot of work went in to the reorganization of the home page, reducing clutter and optimizing the traffic flow, while highlighting the editorial content more.

Much of the work went into reorganizing the homepage such that everything is at your fingertips. From the introductory message about FWJ to the equal height boxes and aligned headings (with a little help from jQuery of course), everything is neatly arranged so you don’t get overwhelmed by the information this massive site has to offer. The grid is your friend.

FWJ’s new logo uses the Philosopher web font, which is designed by Jovanny Lemonad and available for embedding through the Google Font Directory. Under the hood, we’ve turned once again to the trusty by StudioPress.

Apple Gazette

Redesigning AppleGazette was no small feat, even though the design remains familiar to its regular customers. Visually, we had to strike a balance between paying homage to Apple’s design influence and maintaining the site’s own identity. The result is a cleaner, lighter, more streamlined, more modern approach to blog design. If there ever was a site to take advantage of CSS shadows, gradients, and rounded corners, AG was certainly the place to do it!

Like what we did with ForeverGeek, browsing through image attachments was another mandatory feature for our network blog—more sites should do this.

In the mean time we also refreshed Erati, under the lead of Ali Hussain. Our TV series blog, edited by Robin Parish, was totally refreshed and reorganized in order to move away from the popular blog news stream design concept.
The BusinessLogs crew also designed the Splashpress Media/IOIX joint ventures that are Recipe Finder blog, Search Plugins and Infographiclabs.
Ia and Ali Hussain have also worked at the redesign of IndyPosted and work is ongoing for the redesign of a major geek news site (which we sadly can not reveal yet!).

Galleries

Lots of our redesign attention was paid to the creation of galleries, on the WordPress attachment pages. Sadly the media pages within WordPress are often underused, almost forgotten and writers internet-wide tend to leave the link to the images in place when being inattentive for a fraction of a second. When licking an image link the reader is forwarded to a page, often with only the medium sized image shown. A completely poor and unfinished implementation of what could be a useful feature, by the creators of WordPress. We decided to take the attachment pages one level further: not only do we show the large sized image on our attachment pages but we also included thumbnails of all the
images in a post. Examples are abundant and can be seen here on ForeverGeek and Apple Gazette.

Focusing on the galleries and getting WordPress and GenesisWP play together wasn’t always easy, but for those wanting to know how we did get WordPress to display the larger images in GenesisWP read Ia’s tutorial How to change the image size on attachment pages in GenesisWP.

Over the last months the online media scene has changed massively and more than ever users want to follow sites on other devices and platforms. RSS has been one of the major subscription options for tech geeks since years already but never really did take off among non ‘techies’.

The internet landscape has also changed in the last two years and no longer is Google the first location people go to when logging in. More so have mobile devices become more and more platform and especially the new favourite of everyone… Facebook.

Here at Splashpress Media we do find it important to allow people the possibility to discover our content on their preferred platform and follow us in the simplest ways possible. Almost all our sites can easily be found on Facebook and push updates to your news feed every time new content is published. Fans of cooking can easily subscribe to bFeedme on on Facebook and receive the latest updates in their news feed. of course all our sites can be found on Facebook.

If you prefer using Twitter to stay updated with our newest content, you can also follow every site on Twitter. Additionally we created new Splashpress Media Newspapers on Paper.li. Paper.li might be the most interesting option for followers who don’t have time to keep up with all our sites but want an easy way to decide what to read.
There are three different newspapers you can subscribe to, to quickly and easily receive daily updates: